Good evening,
Hardware problems have seriously tied me up for about a week now. My apologies for my
silence on this topic. The hardware issue is not really fixed yet. I likely will be
forced off-line again for several days to a few weeks. If I'm not responding; assume
that that's what's happening.
The fix on Thursday, May 18 did not last. This past Thursday, my workstation again failed
to boot. This time, it dropped me into an emergency shell, not the dracut shell. This
time, the log file was almost twice as long. But it reported fsck failures again, this
time on sda7 rather than sda6. So I tried what my friend did, but with
"/dev/sda7" instead of "/dev/sda6" as the command parameter. I spent
30-45 minutes doing nothing but rapidly hitting the 'y' key before the command
finally completed. (Apparently, hundreds of i-nodes were corrupted this time.) Then the
workstation successfully booted.
I think I spent a week trying to get into BIOS. But I wasn't seeing a BIOS screen
before the grub menu showed up. I think it was when I shut down and started up a
different way that I finally saw the BIOS screen. I quickly changed the time for the BIOS
screen from 2 seconds to 8 seconds. As suggested in this discussion, I checked the
voltages and the clock. The voltages looked fine. The clock was about 5 seconds slow
compared to my "atomic" clock. I adjusted that. This morning, the clock seemed
barely noticeably slow compared to that atomic clock, but by less than a second. So
I'm agreeing with your suspicions that the battery is getting low.
This morning, I tried to replace the battery. Most of the motherboard (ASUS Sabertooth
Z77, bought in early 2013) is covered by a hard, dark gray plastic cover. The battery
should be under that, below the graphics card socket. I could not find a way of getting
that cover off. Neither the user's guide nor the support dvd provided any clues. The
ASUS web site GUI for submitting a support request did not work. Any ideas?
If I have to replace the motherboard, will I have to re-install Fedora and windows-7
(it's a dual-boot system)?
I find it odd that this problem:
* did not seem to affect windows-7 (yet?).
* happened only immediately after doing my weekly Fedora patches ("dnf
upgrade").
* did not occur for a week between the first and second occurrences.
* would corrupt so many i-nodes the second time.
Once the battery gets low enough, I'll have no access to the internet or this list.
How can I get help if I need it? My problems will be beyond what my local IT friends can
handle.
Thank-you for your help so far.
Bill.